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'Still Life' director says Venice prize a sign of respect for Chinese
2006-09-10
Chinese director Jia Zhangke, who won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, said the prize for his "Still Life" was a sign of respect for the people he portrayed. "Really I never, never expected to win this," Jia said Sunday in a video clip posted on Sina.com, one of China's leading web portals, after his film -- a late entry at the Venice event -- took home top honors on Saturday. "This will not only encourage more young directors -- this also shows respect for the people in my film." "Still Life" tells the story of two separated couples in the Yangtze River town of Fengjie and how they deal with the massive relocation of the town to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, the world's biggest hydroelectric project. Jia, 36, has made no bones about the difficulties that the dam has created for up to 1.13 million people who were forced to move out of their homes to make way for the controversial structure. "This film took 10 years to shoot and we were filming the changes facing the lives of ordinary Chinese people. I think this confirms the importance of the ordinary lives of Chinese people," he said. While the Chinese press has so far praised Jia for winning the award, bloggers on the Internet expressed anger over the selection, belittling the film's central themes and backdrop of Fengjie, a dirty and poor town. "This film of Jia Zhangke ... is about coming to terms with the social situation, it is about the fast changes taking place today and how the people must adapt to life and adapt to society," the state Xinhua news agency quoted film experts as saying. One blogger on Sina.com countered: "These kinds of films ... they're all about a backward China, letting the foreigners see our stupid side. "A lot of foreigners, I'm sure, think that we all wear tattered cotton shoes, wear pony tails and long pants and walk along the yellow earth pushing a cart. I would like to see a few more films that reflect contemporary China." Other bloggers pointed out bitterly that many Chinese filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou had profited from movies about rural and poor China. "Right now the method of a lot of well-known Chinese directors is to make a trash film and then win a prize abroad, then come back and become famous," another blogger wrote. Jia's award came only days after China's censors banned director Lou Ye from making films for five years after he showed his "Summer Palace" in competition at the Cannes film festival in May without government approval. That film is set during the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests and follows the open and sexually free lives of Chinese students before the demonstrations and how they deal with the bloody quelling of the protests and its aftermath.
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